Wanderlust
by TheHatterMaddox
Summary: Sasori wakes up. . .with a real body! He hasn't become human again- he died and came to Soul Society. With no purpose and no one to search for in the afterlife, Sasori wanders aimlessly helping strangers and sometimes being helped. Then he gets recruited
1. Prologue

To start with, I don't own any of the lovely characters used (and abused, respectively) in this fanfiction. Why did I start Yaoi con with a _straight paring _you ask? I don't know- it doesn't make sense to me either. I just started writing, so here it is. This is un-beta'd work so I take full responsibility for my failings, and will be happy to take criticism until I'v seen AccA and AccB about it. In the mean time, I posted the raw version. So I present, with much trepidation, The Yaoi Con Submission for Sasamori written by yours truly:

The Hatter Maddox.

Enjoy!

Prologue

Sasori forced his eyes opened- they were far heavier than he remembered them being. The light blinded him, so he blinked as he slowly became aware of his surroundings.

He was lying on the ground, arms straight at his sides like a doll that had been carefully positioned. Then he realized something he hadn't been expecting- he could feel for the first time since he turned his body into a war machine. He could feel his Akatsuki ring, warm on his finger and the gritty dirt of the packed-earth floor beneath his hands. He could feel the hot sun beating down on him and the brush of cloth on his skin. He could feel his own heart beat, pumping blood through his veins and he could breathe, something he wasn't used to.

He held his breath, watching interestedly as stars burst before his eyes and his chest tightened. When the tightening turned to fierce aching he gasped sharply, unaccustomed to the sensation of pain.

He would have to get used to breathing then. In spite of that, in general, he found he liked it, being able to feel again.

_So this is the after-life. I guess there really isn't a hell._

He tried to sit up, but was forced to stop- his head began to spin the minute he lifted it. Discouraged by an intense wave of dizziness, he laid back down and stared at the sky. Only a small circle was visible, framed by the tops of trees. Within the ring of tree-tops was a swathe of deep blue sky and a golden sun that beat down as ribbons of cloud raced past.

He lie there staring up as the clouds streamed by and sweat began to bead on his skin, bringing back an onslaught of old memories. Memories from before Akatsuki, before his experiments, before the art and before his parents' deaths.

Running through the village in summer with his mother in tow, laughing as she chased after him. Visiting Granny Chiyo with his father. Mastering his first puppet under his father's watchful eye- a tiny artist's figurine made of simply-carved wooden pieces on a flexible wire frame, he had been enthralled by its graceful movements, perfectly coordinated to his finger motions. Within a week he could effortlessly guide the tiny doll through intricate dances and battle patterns. He had cried when it broke. Tears. Tears were one of his rarest memories- he hadn't cried since his mother died when he was seven.

Now, all that emotion, all that anger seemed so far away. A drop of sweat rolled into his eye, making him blink. He was _hot _in his Akatsuki cloak- though the light cotton breathed well, the black also captured far too much of the sun's heat. After a few failed attempts at standing, he managed to sit up then crawl to a nearby tree.

He fell against it, letting his back lean on the rough, cool bark. He looked out across the clearing, a small empty stretch of packed dirt surrounded on all sided by tall trees. It was warm, but in the dappled shade of the tree with a cool breeze brushing his face and the back of his neck, Sasori was content.

It wasn't long before he fell asleep, his cloak billowing in the wind.


	2. A Different Moon

Hey All and welcome to Wanderlust, chapter one! I am still without a beta and any form of experience, so feel free to critique it up! Also, I have to warn you: normally I write in hunormous, gargantuan portions, but it takes a while for me to get rolling so the first few chapters might be on the shorter side of perfection. I do apologize, but that's how I cut back on wait time when I'm lacking in drive or direction. Also, if anyone here is offended by intimate activities between characters, fair warning will be given. Sexual jokes or references may occur, but they will most likely be mild. You have been warned, and you will be again before any questionable content is presented. This should not come as a surprise, so please don't blame me. Thank you for your reader-ship,

Hatting Muddox!! (Jk- Hatter Maddox ppl ^^)

P.S: normal text- Omniscient POV

_Italics- Sasori's thoughts (and singing)_

One

Sasori woke up cold, another strange experience. He blinked the sleep from his eyes just in time to see the last of the sun's rays pass the horizon, gilding the treetops which were now cloaked in dusky twilight. It was almost a warm night, with a soft, cool breeze- weather that suggested late summer, just verging on early autumn. A man of the desert, Sasori had never had a good tolerance for cold, and the only warmth left in his body was the center of his back, shielded from the chill wind by the tree trunk he was propped against.

He shivered softly in his cloak, drinking in the feel of the dark, murmuring wind stirring his hair and whispering in his ears. It reminded him of the way his mother used to ruffle it, the sound of her clothes soft, just like everything else about her. He stood, without trouble this time, and walked to the center of the clearing where he stopped to stare up at the full moon.

_ I imagined that I would dream of home; of reality. I suppose that I cannot dream, considering that I am not alive. Even if the dead could dream, I doubt I would. My dreams are silence now._

It was a different moon- fuller, darker and also more radiant. It was a more beautiful moon, a moon that hadn't seen his blood-soaked past. It didn't look down on him, it just hung there in the sky, letting its opalescent light hit everything in the world below.

_ I wonder if our moon is just Tobi's canvas now. _

He remembered the kunoichi who had killed him, perhaps the greatest medic ninja in the world. He remembered the stories of Hatake Copy-Ninja Kakashi maybe the next Hokage and the Nine Tails Jinchuuriki (Naruto if he remembered right) who had was the Fourth Hokage's legacy and the owner of maybe the largest chakra ever.

_ I think not. Tobi never understood youth properly. Maybe because his was so strange._

Sasori knew he had no right to comment on anyone else's youth- he had spent his relentlessly pursuing the form of puppet-making that would grant him his legend status. He had spent his youth driven by monsters he could no longer see. Tobi had certainly done the same, driven by the blood in his veins and the labels that came with it; Tobi was a slave to his Uchiha pride. Sasori did not pity him.

_ One of them will kill him, I expect._

It was a quiet musing, not deserving of overly much thought. Of everything he had left behind, the only things that seemed to connect to him at all were Deidara and his old enemies. Even these thoughts hardly warranted anything like real emotion. He would like it if his old enemies won. In the end though, it was no longer important- that life and anything in it was so far gone it seemed remote, like the life of someone else. It was odd, thinking about the death of his one-time companions, and anticipating their imminent down-fall.

His last lingering though was to hope that Pein and Konan finally eloped. The rest would all come around in time. He stood a moment, watching the wispy remains of the day's full-bodied clouds drift past the moon, cast in pale lilac light. Then, a large could-bank rolled across it, blocking out the moon with was mass of soft, dusky lavender. The moon gone, Sasori returned his attention to the earth, or whatever place it was he had found after death. Chakra was not the same in this place, but even so on the edge of his senses, he could sense a massive energy. Perhaps a village or a town, he supposed.

He wandered off among the trees, choosing a meandering path in the general direction of the energy. It wasn't far, maybe half a day's walk, for he could feel the buzz of the energy like the distant roar of a river, remote in his senses.

The trees were not close here, making it easy for Sasori to walk through the moon beams and bars of shadow. The moonlight felt clean on his skin, bright an pure; but the cool silk of the shadows was better still. He spent a long time like that weaving through the still trees as the moon rose, the only sounds the muffled crunch of his footsteps, the soft sigh of his clothes and the occasional low call of an owl. Alone and undisturbed, unpressed by goals or desires, it was the kind of peace Sasori had rarely experienced in life. When he had sought peace, the other Akatsuki members had the wisdom to let their cranky comrade alone. Even then, on the long solitary wanderings he so often took there were constraints- stay away from these villages, don't be seen, be back in time for out next mission. Always, there was something pressing on Sasori. Now there was nothing, nothing but emptiness so complete it echoed in on its own silence. Sasori very much liked the booming echo of nothing crashing on its self. It was something that foolish Deidara would appreciate only as the setting for a glorious explosion, or so he would have said. He knew that Deidara, fool though he was, and obsessive though he was, valued silence as much as anyone- he was just too wrapped up in his own persona to admit it to himself without an excusing prefix (a dramatic prequel to his "art"). Sasori just liked the quiet.

Sasori didn't know when it started, only when it grew. It was an old memory, of some happy thing. All that remained now was the song- the words rang high and clear in female voices, strangely familiar. He maybe recognized his mother's soprano among the many untied. As he remembered, he began mindlessly to hum, at first under his breath, but then at a more normal volume. Then he began to sing, in a falsetto he had silenced upon adolescence with a put-on gravel in his voice. The gravel was easy, natural to him with the dropping of his voice and it had taken no effort to overpower the singing voice his mother had coveted with the smooth growl brought on by the voice change. Speaking and singing he used the new voice, never trying to use the soaring soprano he knew he still had.

Easily a feminine voice, it well matched his vaguely effeminate looks, and with it he had accomplished many things beyond the abilities of the other members. Soft red hair, delicate features on a strong face and deep eyes that had started many an intense debate on their nameless color somewhere between brown, grey and red combined with pale skin leant him an appearance that was at once powerfully masculine and beautifully feminine. Many men had made sly comments in his presence a little _too _loudly for a whisper, usually to the effect of wondering whether he was taking it up the ass or giving it. The comments failed to turn his head or his thoughts and he remained decidedly unromantic despite the attempts of the love-struck masses, male and female. Sasori Danna as they preferred to call him (Deidara had picked up the habit from them), was simply not interested. With a slight adjustment to his figure, a bit of face paint and a feigned shy smile Sasori Danna had often passed as a woman (his own fictional sister) with no one the wiser. It had never bothered him (his femininity or the cross dressing)- he just didn't want to hear the other Akatsuki members fussing about it, especially after the judicious rumours that spread about Orochimaru once he left, both about his inordinate attachment to the Uchiha boy and to Kabuto.

be told, Sasori was vain: one of the things he used to like so well about life as a puppet was the fact that he never aged or scarred. As the saying went, "the body is a temple", and Sasori had made his body just that. Clean, polished, strong and beautiful; in life he had kept each and every part of his many puppet bodies (and especially his real body) in perfect condition. When he still had a real body, he treated it with equal repect, using a specially designed training regiment to stay fit without losing the sleek agility inherent in his slim build. Always astoundingly strong, Sasori had never put on the bulky muscles favored by so many.

He started at a low murmur, still in his comfortably low rasp. Even with the rasp, his singing voice was smooth, like rough velvet. As he went, he slowly rose to a deep contra alto, then a tenor, finally rising to a free ringing soprano as clear as crystal and equally pure. He had forgotten he could sing, forgotten that he liked it. He doubted there were other people in this place, and hoped that he was right- that voice was something that wasn't to be shared. That was the first time that Sasori divided himself; into what he showed the world, and what he kept within himself and the first distinction he made between what he had been and what he became.

He walked on, beneath the stars, and the song came to an end. He didn't stop, seamlessly returning to the beginning. The owls fell silent and the wind quieted, listening to his voice ringing out among the still night. Sasori just sang, not knowing that in a the heart of a city he had yet to breach, people held their breaths as the strange voice came to them, carried on the night.

_Open your eyes,_

_What do you see?_

_The blue bird flying_

_High and free_

_However sweet,_

_Your song is sorrow_

_Its message sad_

_And imploring_

_In cold and wind_

_And dark and rain_

_Still you sing with_

_The voice_

_Of a thousand lyres_

_Open your eyes_

_And what do you see?_

_The blue bird singing_

_High and free_

_Soaring on wings_

_That never tire_

_You sing the song_

_of a thousand lyres_

_Sweet and slow,_

_Sad and mourning_

_Forever more you'll sing_

_with a voice_

_of a thousand lyres_

_going on and on_

_**The Song of a Thousand Lyres**_

Even after all these years, Sasori couldn't recall what a lyre was, just his mother's laughter as she explained. He was sure it was something very, very lovely because even with word a five year old self had thought sad, his mother had always been happy when singing the bright tune. _He_ was always happy when she sang it.

_A lyre must be a very beautiful thing. . . _

And he walked on.

That's Chapter One!! Just so you all know, this song is actually a poem written by none other than. . .me! I dug it out of a virtual slush pile recently and the fit was too perfect to pass up, so there you go. If anyone was confused, Sasori's voice is NOT naturally high, his voice changed but he can still use the high voice when he wants to though which I know sin't usually possible. Sasori is just special. In the words of all great fanfiction writers "Read and review"! With that said, please spread the word and please visit my forum for more quirky pairings and info on The Yaoi Con. PLEASE NOTE: **_THE YAOI CON IS NOT ACTUALLY ALL ABOUT YAOI!!!!_ Shocking, I know, but I just named it that for no particular reason. Yaoi will most likely occur, but advanced and explicit warnings will be given, and a lot of non-yaoi fun-ness will also be included so regardless of prefferences, please take a look. Thanks again,**

**Hatter Maddox**


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